![]() Daniels plays him as a man in eternal retreat, even if he is confronting racism in its most dangerous form. Both his black housekeeper Calpurnia (an excellent LaTanya Richardson Jackson) and his son Jem (Will Pullen) question exactly where Atticus’ high-minded belief in people’s essential goodness and the necessity of behaving properly-even towards those who mean you and your loved ones harm-leaves him and those around him.Ĭalpurnia repeats Atticus' words back to him with curdling disdain Jem tries to rouse his father from his good-guy somnambulance.ĭaniels’ Atticus is folksy and ruffled, without Peck’s idealistic though hardened eye. One of the sharpest moments featuring Keenan-Bolger sees her patrolling the courtroom, a narrative ghost, empathetically observing the pain of Robinson’s accuser Mayella Ewell (Erin Wilhelmi), this past her own anger, our anger, at what Scout (and we) presume to be Mayella’s lies at the service of her racist and violent father Bob Ewell (Frederick Weller).Ītticus’ liberal pieties and principles are interrogated, rather than placed on a pedestal. “Keenan-Bolger, just like the movie’s Mary Badham, projects a fierce self-possession, a severe wedge-bob, a genderless defiance and derring-do where a girlish sweetness never was, and a fierce loyalty to her father” Keenan-Bolger, just like the movie’s Mary Badham, projects a fierce self-possession, a severe wedge-bob, a genderless defiance and derring-do where a girlish sweetness never was, and a fierce loyalty to her father which saves both his and Tom Robinson’s lives. Keenan-Bolger is a wonderful guide for the play’s audience, just as her character is in the book and the film. You are thankful for the ball of energy and inquiry that is Celia Keenan-Bolger’s Scout. Bartlett Sher’s direction, however, is too languid: the tension of the book and film-what happened at the time versus what an adult Scout, as a narrator, knows-is missing. Some have said this is jarring it worked fine for me. The child characters (Scout and Jem, Atticus’ children, and Dill) are played by adults. The play doesn’t have full sets, but elements of sets that whizz up from and across the stage. Sorkin’s casting anew is not total, and it takes place alongside some well-placed memory jabs evoked through Miriam Beuther’s period design, featuring sections of houses on cinder blocks, and a circular courtroom. Which is to say: My cultural-emotional hard-wiring watching the play may be different to many reading this and seeing the play. friends speak about reading the book aged around 12, or of seeing the film, some in the early 1960s, and how impactful it was. This, amazingly, is its first ever production on Broadway.įull disclosure: This critic is not American. Peck won an Oscar for his role, and the book and film remain fiercely cherished American classics pop-cultural landmarks about racism, prejudice, and injustice released in the Civil Rights era. Jeff Daniels plays Finch on stage the two men share a predilection for light-colored suits but little else. ![]() ![]() However you feel about Aaron Sorkin’s adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird, which opened on Broadway tonight, you are most certainly not in Harper Lee’s original setting of Maycomb, Alabama, in 1933 to 1935 or the Maycomb as imagined by director Robert Mulligan when he made Lee’s 1960 novel into the 1962 movie, starring Gregory Peck as the unimpeachably principled and upstanding lawyer Atticus Finch. ![]()
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